 Mae'r gweithio gyfarfodd, oherwydd y gallwn ni fydd yna'r gweithio gyfarfodd. Rwy'n cael ei fod yn ddod. Gallwn ni wedi bod wedi'i wneud o gydag. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ar gyfer y cyfnodau mewn gwahanol, ac yn cyfrifio'r cyfrifio, ac yn cael ei wneud o gydag. Ac ynddo chi'n ei wneud o'r gweithio gydag. Rwy'n cael ei wneud o gyfrifio'r gweithio, oherwydd yng Nghymru. A'r gweithio'n hetoddyn nhw, If I was a marketing person yesterday that kind of annoyed me so I thought, hey, I would tell you that I am not a marketing person, I am a technologist I was a programmer, I am slightly power hungry as you would expect so I became a project manager, because I wanted all that power. Mae'r cyfaintrwaith. Mae dwi'n gweithio o DDSDm, mae'r f projectingau ynglyn yourselfaeth a'r cyfaintrwaith o'r DDSDm. Mae'r cyfaintrwaith o ddydig. Mae'r cyfaintrwaith o'r ddiwedd, oeddech chi'n gweithio. Ben ddiwedd, i'n ffordd, y cyfnod y connects. This is probably the least risque picture I could find for this presentation. They introduced me to Agile. It was the most amazing experience I could have gone through, right? Mainly because there was plenty of underwear right around the office and then a whole bunch of stickies on a big glass wall trying to explain what the website would deliver and when it would deliver it and whether it would ever deliver it. this was the new product that we wanted to deliver, actually, it was a new platform, the team I was working with wanted to deliver. So that's kind of a potted history of how I got into Agile, I think the point at it wanted to make was that I haven't been certified in any sense of the word. I've learnt from the job and I know that's slightly different from where we're coming from I know that London is an environment definitely values experience over qualifications But I do think it's really important to do. So I'm here to talk about hacking the sales process with Canban and Agile. I wanted to talk about it because I've been doing it for the last 6 and 7 months. It hasn't been a smooth process. So it's not been...if you're coming to this talk to find out how to do it for your own organisation, probably won't have the answer for you. I'm sorry. But I can tell you how not to do it and how not to do the obvious things. I'm also going to assume that you know nothing about my organisation because we started two years ago. We started in 2013. We're a group of software developers. We're a group of software developers that all met at Figleves as it happens. We're all a little bit older, so we're all in our sort of 30s and 40s, so we have a lot of experience. We can add up over 100 years of experience and good experience timelines. We are all slightly burnt out. That's probably the best way to describe us. We are all people who want to sit on the beach and programme. We're not a bunch of people who really want to be in an office, and so the guys on the pictures behind you, they are based in Barcelona. Russ on the right actually does most of, he's actually our agile champion within the organisation, and he actually spends most of his time on a train traversing Europe, and that's kind of where my team are. We kind of run our sprints weekly with them all traversing all over the place. What we do, or why we exist, so someone yesterday was talking about, I think it was Mr Toad as he called himself. Toad was talking about having a vision. So we decided that we had a very clear vision of what we wanted to do. We wanted to make decision making software. When I was a kid, there was a very little choice, right? And we're now completely and utterly overwhelmed with choice. So, you know, my Nana G would say, oh, do you want a drink? You knew what that meant. You knew I'm getting a thumbs up. Now I have no idea. I have no idea if I'm going to get a paper boat mango juice, or a Coca-Cola, or a Pepsi leher, or whatever it is. I just don't not know with the wide choice that's out there which one to choose. I'm a bit useless at choice anyway. Not only that, we have technology that's kind of pushing this towards us. They're trying to make choices for us, right? My phone is constantly telling me that right now it's telling me that I'm two hours away from the Bangalore airport, and therefore about five hours from my home in Delhi. Continually telling me this. I don't want to go to Delhi. I really don't want to go to Delhi. It may not even be my diary it's telling me about as well. It's actually trying to tell me about my, in this case, my CEO's diary. And obviously what we are really interested in is this quote from Stephen Hawking's, which talks about could it all be the end of everything? If everybody is making decisions for you with all our technology, would it all end? Might not. I don't know. We kind of don't believe that. But when it comes into technology, agile delivery, there are definitely things that we are doing. We're looking at reports, we're looking at KPIs, we're looking at numbers. We're kind of driven by all of those items. We're not really making decisions for ourselves. So what it means for us as an organisation, and I won't dwell too much on it, is that we focus purely on retail and purely on helping our clients make better decisions. If you're a woman who goes shopping, or if you're a guy who goes shopping with a woman, you will know how very, very, very difficult it is. We have no idea what size we are in stores. That's compounded with online shopping. So we came up with our first product a couple of years ago, which is called What's My Size. And you put in your measurements, we tell you what size you are in each store. We went B2B 18 months ago, so we had to re-platform, and we actually deliver within product pages on e-com sites. We have a couple of other products all around iPhone and delivery, which I won't bore you with. But the point of that was to tell you that we built the whole thing in agile. When we started, we started from the ground up. We said, right, we're going to get together, we're going to do this, and how we're going to deliver it. And we decided we were going to do one-week sprints. Remember, my guys do not week to week. I don't know where they're going to be. I also don't know what country or what time zone, and also their availability. So we run one-week sprints, which they tell us on a Friday that they're available for the next week. We then do our, on a Monday morning, we do our retrospective and our sprint planning. And it allows things for this to happen. So one of my developers was in Barcelona meeting another developer and the team, fell off his bike, ended up in hospital. It allowed us to kind of adjust our sprint planning into the next week. So extend into weekends, deliver on time. But within people managing their own timelines, I think Zee talked about it yesterday where he was talking about not being linear in your processes, but kind of just extracting and working on the basis that you want to. I haven't used his terminology, I apologise. I've noticed that we haven't talked much about tools over the last two days. I don't know if it's interesting to you, but I will talk about ours because I'm in love with them. Going back to decision making and technology, telling me everything I need to know. These are the ones I'm in love with. We use a trailer backlog, obviously. You probably all do too. We use Skype to do our stand-ups. We know exactly when we should be there. We use Slack to message, which is probably the first thing I've been using recently. I'm going to have to admit it. We use PowerPoint, but that's because we have to talk to our board directors. Going back to my very first slide, one of the most exciting things about where I am at the moment is we're an all-women director team. So it's a really exciting place to work, but they still need PowerPoint slides. So I need to change that. We obviously use things like wiki and WordPress in big bucket. Okay, so the problem. We definitely had a sales problem. We had grown to 12 people as founders, and I know that a lot of you are from service industries here, so you've got much bigger organisations, much bigger teams, but as founding members of a company, you do your own sales. That's pretty much how that boils down to. My CEO was doing it. She invited me to come back six months ago and join her, and she had grown an amazing company. We've just closed 10% profitability in the first year. We have all our sales tasks effectively in her head, but as I'm being videoed, I'll repeat that and say, obviously, it was documented all over the place and it was just very low, et cetera. Not really true. All the tasks that this customer needed this item and we needed to close this contract on this date just wasn't documented anywhere in the process. The other thing to note was that last-minute requirements were completely killing our sprints. Obviously, we do our planning on a Monday, someone would go out and do a sale on Tuesday, everything needed to be changed, and that kind of, I don't know, cumflet ddiwedd lawerol ar gweithreoli ni i. Mae gennym i ymdain o'r taw, neu mi oedd y taw o'r taw o'r taw o'r gweithreoli. Fellywch yn ni oed i lle i ymddangos. Felly gweld hynny o fydda nhw, yn y rhaid i fynt o'r bach ac ydych chi ar sucif arall a fyddych chi'n wneud i'r newydd nifer o gyfer am yr awd. Felly byddwn i'n gwneud ymdangos. A ydych chi'n gweithio'n taw I was asked to sort of talk about how you influence change within an organisation. Evan talked about it this morning, how do you talk out to your marketing people, how do you talk out to your sales people etc etc. But actually remember I said I was power hungry. Life is about your personality of change. I think somebody yesterday talked about anthropology. You really have to understand the people within your organisation, the people who lead it, but also the people who are going to deliver against your thoughts, your ideas. Obviously India has gone through a huge amount of change with its new leadership. You can see that, you can feel it in the country. It feels so different from a year ago. Obviously more relevant to today, you can see change not happening. The England cricket team is nowhere to be seen. Obviously there's a lot to do with the fact that they haven't changed leadership at all within the last few months. They haven't made, they didn't make enough changes I don't think in order to get out of their group, but that's the case. My kind of leadership is definitely about, I said I'm power hungry, I've got my tantrums, I definitely do. If I'm saying that we're going to make a change, I'm co-founder of the company, I kind of get to say that. But that's not enough, right? It's not enough just to say hey I've got the job title, I actually have to take everyone with me, I have to go and talk to everybody. And what's really interesting for my journey was that I'd never done Kanban before, I'd never done it. So when I joined the organisation they started teaching me. They started teaching me and saying hey we've got this amazing process that you have to, you know, you put it out into the board like this, you take your tickets off like this, it's kind of, you know, we fit it into our scrum like this, we're writing a playbook, you should read it, you should understand it, it's like okay, I understand that. I still have a sales problem, I still don't know what sales are going to happen on one day. So I still want to CRM system, I'm kind of traditionalist, I want to CRM system. Right? And my criteria for a sales CRM system was price, usability and prettiness. You know, I'm a girl, I want it to look cool, I don't want to like interact with something all day long and it's a bit crap. So definitely usability is really important to me. We looked at a bunch of things, we looked at Salesforce's most powerful system, if you're in enterprise level organisations, you'll be using it, I'm sure, or have interaction with it. We looked at Affinity Pool and Signal 37. My favourite was simply HQ, which kind of every time it went wrong, sent out some Nordic 404 errors, it's kind of there out. Does anyone have any questions on choosing a CRM system? No. Cool. I chose Bittrick. I chose Bittrick and why I really like it is because, as I had just said, I was being canonised. Is that a term? I'm not sure. Anyway, I was being indoctrinated and as I was being indoctrinated I was thinking, oh, this would be an ideal way to do your sales, right? You identify all your leads. You identify all of those leads that kind of might convert this month, this week, et cetera, et cetera. Then I'll actually pick out who those people are and actually contact them or get them to a seminar or do something with them this week and then actually close the deal or put a deal in front of them over the next few weeks. So being able to manage that in a process that's linear, this system allowed me to do. So, the next change we made to the whole organisation was that we made sure that everybody who did sales and was doing a sprint came to the same daily stand-up. And so they actually came in and they talked about what sales items they had. It got really frustrating. So this is the first thing where I had to learn really quickly. It took what was actually a 10-minute sprint. They go, what did you do? What are you doing today? What do you need from us? To being, oh my god, I've got this customer and they're being a pain and they want all these different functionality and they want it by next week and I can't close the deal. It was just like an angst ridden session. So we had to close it down and go, okay, that's not what we need you to do. What you need to do is retrain and actually say, right, we'll do these tasks and if it doesn't get done, we'll escalate it and we'll talk to somebody else. Obviously remember the problem with being power hungry and at the top of the list is that, you know, there isn't actually anyone to escalate it to so I have to go into a room and think about it somewhere. The other thing, so the next thing that you would think was quite obvious is to decide whether people within the sales function, i.e. me, the CEO, the other couple of people who do that would be coming to a planning meeting and actually sort of dictating what functionality and what tasks they want during the week. We looked at it. We looked at it really, really closely. We decided that those angst ridden conversations about are we going to make money, are we going to close the deal was just too depressing to have once a week in planning. What you want in planning is a much more upbeat conversation about what we're going to do and how we're going to deliver it. So what we have is something called the weekly sales call. It's got its old fashion terminology, which is fine, it's not agile, but it's actually a story writing session. It's a story where, so we do it about an hour before, I do it at 9 o'clock in a Monday morning UK time and then we go into planning and within that we spend our time kind of figuring out what stories are relevant, what things are actually functional stories for product development, what are stories around managing the client, what are just DevOps stories, kind of pulling those apart, explaining that to the salesperson who's leading the contact with the client and then directing them into the right board. And then it's up to them to then get to the right daily stand up and to get to the right sprint planning session if they feel it's important. I'm not sure if this picture does it justice, but it's kind of there. So, you know, we've got our roadmap, we have that very overlying roadmap that we talk to our board with. We have our sales meeting that's bringing up more stories. We obviously have our retrospectives that are more standard stories going, my server's gone down, there's not enough space, I need this kind of story onto the backlog, that kind of maintenance stuff that's coming through. And we're obviously managing that through the sort of Trello and Scrum process. Felly, an example. So, Z yesterday said, isn't it awesome to have marketing people in your sprints? It is. It is amazing having marketing people in your sprints. We had to relaunch our website. In fact, I wish I had a picture of our old website. It looks like the Indian train timetable website is pretty awful. But we wanted to convert that to being something a bit more glossy. The first time we did it, I wrote it in WordPress over a Saturday because I was a bit bored. But the second time we reiterated it, we put it through a sprint. And the reason that we put it through a sprint was that our sales team has said, it's pretty crappy. We need to fix this. We need prices on the website. We need to know what the product does. We need to have material about what's going on. And it's like, well, that's all like marketing stuff. That's all like literature that needs writing. That's all like pictures that need to be taken. My product, you know, my self-development team isn't going to know how to do that. So, what we did was we got Kerry, who's awesome. We got her aligned in the sprint. We actually got her to work with me to run it. We then got our scrum master and we put them together in one place. We decided what the website needed to look like, but we did that. This is a one-week sprint. So, in the first day, all we said is, this is all the stuff we need. On the second day, we simply said, right, okay, this is all the marketing material you're going to get by Thursday because we can't launch on a Friday because, you know, it might fall over. So, we're going to launch on Thursday. So, all the marketing material was delivered over the couple of days, all pulling it through the Kanban, Trello, Storyboards. We didn't do all of it. We forgot to do the QQs requirement, which is likely important by EU legislation. But we focused on the stuff that our sales team needed to meet their delivery to the customer and their sales pitch was on Friday. So, I was pretty excited about that. And it was really exciting to actually not have any technical people in a sprint for once. It was kind of fun. The only bit that we couldn't do was delivery out to live. So, we actually had to, the go live process actually needed some technical support. So, we're done, right? I'm on the beach. It's all calm. It's gorgeous. No. It's all about numbers at the end of the day. It's all great. We've hacked the sales process. We now know where the sales processes are. We know that my client A needs these three things before they're going to sign on Friday. We know we need these two things done by next Tuesday in order to get in front of them, et cetera, et cetera. But we're still not closing deals. It didn't solve the underlying problem, which is why I was brought in, which was that actually we need to close some deals. Now, that was problem one. So, hold on to that. We do something else at 50. I didn't implement this. My CEO who is brilliant, she came up with this. Has everyone seen this before? These are the 12 lists of employment, employment questions. Yes, one nod. If you haven't, there's a link going Google it. It's fascinating. What we did with it was we went right. At the end of the retrospective, we said how many things went right, how many things went wrong. We took the number from that. So, if it was like three items and five items, and we just took that number and read it out. And then we went right around the team and said, I don't know, my supervisor or someone work seems to care about me as a person. We asked these questions. What was really interesting to us was we were getting consistent feedback over about six weeks, a month, six weeks. The thing is that we weren't closing sales. We haven't been closing sales for a variety of reasons. The product may be what was a seminar yesterday or so. It might be one of the dogs. It might be one of the cows. We're not quite sure which quadrant it is. I might need to go back and do some homework. But we know from our own point of view, as individuals, that actually I, as an individual, is I'm not a salesperson. It's not what I do. Remember, I'm not a marketing person. I said that up front as well. But I'm not a salesperson. And I'm doing a job that actually I'm not enjoying. I'm taking tickets off a board where I'm going, actually, I don't want to phone that person up. I don't want to ask them what their requirement is because they're killing me. I don't really want to write a contract for them. But that's just me. There's going to be other people who want to do that, right? I skip over this slide, I think. We had to hire. We had to change. I had to find somebody who I could give these tasks to, who was really interested in making those things happen. They were as passionate as our products as I am. But they're more passionate about phoning the clients up and convincing them. And that was really important. So I think Evan, to call you out, talked this morning about the constant hiring, the agile hiring process, right? And that's exactly what we do at 50. We constantly have a group of people that we're continually talking to. And the salesperson that I picked, his name's Sam, he had been helping me from last August. I gave him a call in August and said, I'm back in town. Do you want to hang out? And since then, he once a month would introduce me to a new sale. Off his own back, I didn't even buy him a drink to make it happen. So you know he's a good guy. And then about two months ago, he said he was looking for a new role. And about two weeks ago, he joined us. We had already lined him up. We knew that he was the person that we wanted to work with should this day come. Kind of probably was going to come. And also, we knew that he was in for the long call because he was there and he was consistent all the way through. And we do that with developers. We do that with testers, et cetera, et cetera. We keep a roster of people who want to help with work with us, come in, do contract, freelance, take them on permanently. So, how much time do I have? I've gone really quickly. I apologize. You'll have loads of questions or you can get to the cricket. So this is two weeks. I'm like two weeks into my new exciting relinquishing power. Remember, power hungry. It's really hard to give all that power away to a new person coming in. They're not a fake product manager. They need to be a real product manager. I need to empower Sam to be able to talk to clients, make decisions, change processes, do what he needs to do to be successful. But that tension remains in the room. Is it the sale? Is it the client who needs to deliver? Or is it us that's trying to push our products forward? Is it our mission statement of helping decision makers? Or when the client says, actually, I just want to mine all your emails and spam them with my latest dress or something. My salesperson goes, yeah, that's exactly what I want. That's exactly what you should do. Buy it for us for millions. Do we let him sign the contract? It's hard to say. I do know if I'm talking to all of you guys over the last two days is that what I need to go home and do is do some serious training. I think I need to go back to the white board and say, right, Sam, you've come into lead the sales focus. We're about four or five people underneath you. They're all agile enabled. They know how to get their requirements out from your head, which is effectively what's going on, and your conversation over coffee and your promises that you may have made, and then actually put that into a process where he understands what the consequences of that are, put it into the process, and then deliver that out. I just wanted to say, watch the space because I think I need another six months to run the trial and see where we get to. I apologise. It was very, very short. Any questions? There's a good question. It changes per individuals. I can talk about them. Developers are thrilled. They're absolutely thrilled. They really want to process. They really want to know what we're doing. They really want to know what customers we're talking to, and when we're talking to them so that they can help us. Also, because they're opting into the next sprint, they can figure out that cool piece of functionality is going to come off the backlog and get delivered next week because that signature is going on that contract. They will put their hand up and change their holiday schedule, et cetera, et cetera. I'm interested. I think I can't remember whose talk it is, but there is definitely attention at the other extreme where you've got people going, look, I don't want to deal with 10 stakeholders in your team. I just want to say, yes, I'm going to sell this data model, or I'm just going to send this application, or I just want to change the pricing. That's actually what we did last week. We changed the pricing for all of our products. We did it on a whim, but we did it because we actually had a client who would pay that amount for that product. You suddenly are being pushed into this environment where you're changing really, really fast, and that is causing some issues at board level, which says once a month ago you said you'd make this kind of profitability because you're selling at this kind of numbers, and then this month you're saying it's completely different. It's one client, higher margin, that kind of thing. Is that helpful? Good question. As we're quite small, most of us own the company. There's no reason to have a commission-based process because we don't actually have bonuses either to preempt that conversation. The idea is that hopefully we will be, once we exit or once we get to another level and we start paying shareholders, that would be our bonus and profitability. The model that we've got for our new sales people is on a commission basis as it happens, but what's interesting about that is that the functionality that they are over promising, I think was your question before, the kind of diminishing profitability out of their overselling is also coming from that product income. It's literally going right, okay, you're selling this, you're taking this much commission, but the product does this at the moment and you've oversold by this much functionality, that's going to come out of this project profitability, and then we're looking at each project profitability as such. Does that make sense? That's good. Mostly is the development process along with the sales process. So when I was selling, not much, but then I'm very honest and I'm very honest about where we are in that process, and this is a real tension. This goes back to one of the things I do not know how to solve. I'll put it back out to you. I'm a technologist. I want to sell what I actually have, the idea of just going in and lying and saying, hey, we'll do all these other things. Now, I'd be there. I've worked with salespeople who have done that. I think what we're moving towards, in fact, I had that conversation very last night when I got back that said, I'm quite comfortable with you saying that we could do this functionality, this functionality, and this functionality, as long as you say it's on the roadmap, as long as you say it's, you've put it onto the backlog and that we are going to deliver it at some point within the foreseeable future. Remember, if we looked at sugar, I remember looking at sugar. It didn't, for some reason, I couldn't get a licence. Is it possible, because I was in India at the time? I'm not sure, because I couldn't, because some of these licenses, it's open source. I can't remember why we didn't, it didn't make the final list. We certainly looked at it. I'll have to dig out my notes. I'm really sorry. Microsoft's interesting in that we definitely wanted a sort of, again, it probably is now open source, but at the time we kind of, I have my own personal objections to Microsoft, which I haven't got over. Anything else? It's a good question. So, we have adjusted retrospectives to fit in on a Friday afternoon if we need to. We don't fix it to a Friday afternoon in case the developer decides to, I don't know, one of them went off and did a marathon and then did the rest of their work on Sunday. So there's allowing our developers to have that flexibility is more important than kind of going, hey, I want you, I want my stuff on this date. Sustainability is actually much better. I've done lots of different types of sprints, so three weeks at Iris that we were talking about earlier, we did continuous kind of three sprints, three week sprints cycles. It's just a bit slow. You know that momentum that you have, you start at the beginning, you're really excited for the first three or four days, you've got all these tasks, you know what you're doing, and then you get to the second week and you're like, oh, I've got another week of this, and my tester doesn't have anything to do because they'll be doing whatever they're doing. And then you get to the third week and it's like, whoa, I have to get this done. And then everyone does late nights. What we find with this is that you compress that, right? So you're compressing that to going all the assignments on Monday, you start really doing the kind of bits of things that you need to do on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you wrap it all up on Friday, you still panic and you still maybe slide in for the weekend, but if you don't, then you get a very nice weekend and then you go into your Monday. And so from the sustainability point of view, I would advocate one-week sprints. I'm a big believer. Yes. I'm sorry, and I should have mentioned that in the talk, that I think is what makes it feasible. We talk as a team on a Monday morning, we get as many of the board in as we can so that there's some discussion about the product roadmap if there's a client who's gone off-piste and wants to do something completely different. We get all the sales team in who are talking to individual clients. So when we say sales, this is a nominal term, it's not a job description, so obviously, sorry, it's not a job title. So obviously anyone talking to a client is considered sales in this and they would come in. And I think, yes, having a week is quite useful. And then something you said earlier was that these couple of us are like lone hounds. We just want our client. There are a couple of clients where it's like, my client, I want to give it to you. It allows that for one week for those guys to go off, have their direct conversations with their clients, and then come back and report if they've made any progress. It does the other thing as well. We're in short products sales. We need to move on really quickly. These are retailers. They're paying about 1,000 UK pounds a month for this product. It's not like selling half a million pound tech project. So we need to know in a week or two weeks whether they're going to close. Now, obviously, we do services. If you look at the website, you'll realise we do services as well outside of product. Those sales cycles just do not fit into that one week model. You will be talking about requirements for two months and then say, right, we're going to do it agile and it's just on this bucket of money. Anymore? Cool. Thank you so much.